“Where can you find locks of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s and Mary Shelley’s hair alongside the fragments of Sappho’s poetry? At the Bodleain Libraries in Oxford, England. And also in the book “Marks of Genius: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Bodleian Libraries.” The book includes writings and drawings and ephemera dating from ancient times — Sappho’s fragments are from the 2nd century AD — to the 20th century. Over all that time what constitutes genius has changed.” (via LA Times)

Comments Off on Literary treasures from Oxford’s Bodleian Libraries

September 4, 2014Comments Off on Literary treasures from Oxford’s Bodleian LibrariesBodleian, Oxford

“Large bright badges offering help to customers may have become a common sight in coffee shops. But the wearing of them by librarians at the University of Oxford has been seen as the latest insult in a row over changes taking place among the dreaming spires’ famous research collections. Anger has been growing in the past few months over developments at the Bodleian Libraries that have led to vast humanities collections being rehoused, including the History Faculty Library being incorporated into the main collections. Matters came to a head last week with a discussion in Congregation — Oxford’s academic “parliament” — about “the libraries and their future.”

“Stanford University Press is pleased to announce it will partner with Oxford University Press (OUP) to launch Stanford Scholarship Online on OUP’s University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO) platform to take advantage of a fully enabled XML environment with cutting-edge search and discovery functionality*.”

“The Oxford-Google Digitization project – established in 2004 – has reached an exciting stage in its development with the Bodleian Libraries books digitized by Google now fully available to the academic community and the general public for the first time. Much of the material that the Bodleian collaboratively digitized with Google has only been available in “snippet” or “metadata-only” view to users of Google Books outside the US. By making the Bodleian copy of the digitized books available online, the material becomes fully available to all users in PDF format. This feature has proved popular since its soft launch in March of this year. From the initial load of about 335 thousand books, users from all over the world have made already close to 60,000 downloads.”